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 and on their mutual relations; a science which we have not to invent, but to discover.” But he saw clearly that such ideas with their necessary accompaniments could only be realized through a long and laborious process of social transformation. He strongly detested the prurient-immorality of the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier. He attacked them not less .bitterly for thinking that society could be changed off-hand by a ready made and complete scheme of reform. It was “the most accursed lie,” he said, “that could be offered to mankind.” In social change he distinguishes between the transition and the perfection or achievement. With regard to the transition he advocated the progressive abolition of the right of anbaine, by reducing interest, rent, &c. For the goal he professed only to give the general principles; he had no ready-made scheme, no utopia. The positive organization of the new society in its details was a labour that would require fifty Montesquieus. The organization he desired was one on collective principles, a free association which would take account of the division of labour, and which would maintain the personality both of the man and the citizen. With his strong and fervid feeling for human dignity and liberty, Proudhon could not have tolerated any theory of social change that did not give full scope for the free development of man. Connected with this was his famous paradox of anarchy, as the goal of the free development of society, by which he meant that through the ethical progress of men government should become unnecessary. “Government of man by man in every form,” he says, “is oppression. The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.” Proudhon, indeed, was the first to use the word anarchy, not in its revolutionary sense, as we understand it now, but as he himself says, to express the highest perfection of social organization.

Proudhon’s theory of property as the right of anbaine is substantially the same as the theory of capital held by Marx and most of the later socialists. Marx, however, always greatly detested Proudhon and his doctrines, and attacked him violently in his Misère de la philosophies. Property and capital are defined and treated by Proudhon as the power of exploiting the labour of other men, of claiming the results of labour without giving an equivalent. Proudhon’s famous paradox, “La propriété, c'est le vol,” is merely trenchant expression of this general principle. As slavery is assassination inasmuch as it destroys all that is valuable and desirable in human personality, so property is theft inasmuch as it appropriates the value produced by the labour of others without rendering an equivalent. For property Proudhon would substitute individual possession, the right of occupation being equal for all men.

 PROUST, ANTONIN (1832–1905), French journalist and politician, was born at Niort on the 15th of March 1832. He founded in 1864 an anti-imperial journal, La Semaine hebdomadaire which appeared at Brussels. He was war correspondent to Le Temps in the early days of the Franco-German War, but after Sedan he returned to Paris, where he became secretary to Gambetta and superintended the refugees in Paris. He entered the Chamber as deputy for his native town in 1876, taking his seat on the left. In Gambetta’s cabinet (1881–1882) he was minister of the fine arts, and in the Chamber of Deputies he was regularly commissioned to draw up the budget for the fine arts, after the separate department had ceased to exist. Prosecuted in connexion with the Panama scandals, he was acquitted in 1893. From this time he lived in the closest retirement. On the 20th of March 1905 he shot himself in the head, dying of the wound two days later.  PROUST, JOSEPH LOUIS (1754–1826), French chemist, was born on the 26th of September 1754 at Angers, where his father was an apothecary. After beginning the study of chemistry in his father’s shop he came to Paris and gained the appointment of apothecary in chief to the Salpetriére, also lecturing on chemistry at the innsée of the aeronaut J. F. Pilatre de Rozier, whom he accompanied in a balloon ascent in 1784. Next, at the instance of Charles IV., he went to Spain, where he taught chemistry first at the artillery school of Segovia, and then at Salamanca, finally becoming in 1789 director of the royal laboratory at Madrid. In 1808 he lost both his position and his money by the fall of his patron, and retired first to Craon in Mayenne and then to Angers, where he died on the 5th of July 1826. His name is best known in connexion with a long controversy with C. L. Berthollet. The latter chemist was led by his doctrine of mass-action to deny that substances always combine in constant and definite proportions. Proust, on the other hand, maintained that compounds always contain definite quantities of their constituent elements, and that in cases where two or more elements unite to form more than one compound, the proportions in which they are present vary per saltum, not gradually. In 1799 he proved that carbonate of copper, whether natural or artificial, always hasthe same composition, and later he showed that the two oxides of tin and the two sulphides of iron always contain the same relative weights of their components and that no intermediate indeterminate compounds exist. His analytical skill enabled him to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the researches by which Berthollet attempted to support the opposite view, and to show among other things that some of the compounds which Berthollet treated as oxides were in reality hydrates containing chemically combined water, and the upshot was that by 1808 he had fully vindicated his position. Proust also investigated the varieties of sugar that occur in sweet vegetable juices, distinguishing three kinds, and he showed that the sugar in grapes, of which he announced the existence to his classes at Madrid in 1799, is identical with that obtained from honey by the Russian chemist J. T. Lowitz (1757–1804).

 PROUSTITE, a mineral consisting of silver sulpharsenite, Ag3AsS3, known also as light red silver ore, and an important source of the metal. It is closely allied to the corresponding sulphantimonite, pyrargyrite, from which it was distinguished by the chemical analyses of J. L. Proust in 1804, after whom the mineral received its name. Many of the characters being so similar to those of (q.v.) they are mentioned under that species. The prismatic crystals are often terminated by the scalenohedron $($20$\overline{1}$$)$ and the obtuse rhombohedron {110}, thus resembling calcite (dog-tooth-spar) in habit. The colour is scarlet-vermilion and the lustre adamantine; crystals are transparent and very brilliant, but on exposure to light they soon become dull black and opaque. The streak is scarlet, the hardness 2, and the specific gravity 5·57. The mode of occurrence is the same as that of pyrargyrite, and the two minerals are sometimes found together. Magnificent groups of large crystals have been found at Chañarcillo in Chile; other localities which have yielded fine specimens are Freiberg and Marienberg in Saxony, Joachimsthal in Bohemia and Markirch in Alsace.  PROUT, SAMUEL (1783–1852), English water-colour painter, was born at Plymouth on the 17th of September 1783. He spent whole summer days, in company with the ill-fated Haydon, in drawing the quiet cottages, rustic bridges and romantic watermills of the beautiful valleys of Devon. He even made a journey through Cornwall to try his hand in furnishing sketches for Britton’s Beauties of England. On his removal in 1803 to London, which became his headquarters after 1812, a new scene of activity opened up before Prout. He now endeavoured to